Music prediction markets are quickly impacting the fan experience. Now, through companies like Kalshi and Polymarket, anyone willing to place a bet on the outcome of future events, which can range anywhere from elections to the weather to Grammy winners and chart placements, can earn serious cash — and music fans are cashing in. In 2025, $70 million had been traded on Kalshi’s music prediction markets, and in 2026 to date, that number has already over quadrupled to over $400 million and counting.
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One Ariana Grande superfan, a school teacher named Brandon Fean, earned six figures and dug himself out of student loan debt from his well-informed trades on charts, streaming numbers and Grande lore. Another fan, an unnamed IT professional and father of twin boys, made over $380,000 just on his musical expertise.
On this week’s episode of Billboard’s On the Record podcast, COO and co-founder of Kalshi, Luana Lopes Lara, joins to talk about how prediction markets are colliding with the music industry, how it could change the fan economy and why Kalshi’s music offerings are growing so fast.
Watch or listen to the full episode of On the Record below on YouTube, or check it out on other podcast platforms here.
One of the biggest buzzwords in the music industry right now is “superfans” — which basically means highly engaged fans. Everyone wants to capture additional value from superfans, but it feels like no one has totally cracked the idea yet. Do you envision Kalshi as, essentially, a superfan platform?
Absolutely. I think the way you describe it is: there’s a side of how do you actually monetize the dedication of fans? Like, how do you merchandise all those things? But for the super fan themselves, the question is: how do I actually monetize the infinite hours I put into this? I’m reading every single piece of gossip and analyzing every Easter egg in a song and all of that. Kalshi is a very good platform for super fans to actually turn a lot of their time and their hobby and their expertise into real money.
We talked about the Ariana Grande super fan — but there’s another guy: he’s an IT professional, has twin sons, and he’s made, I think, over $380,000 just on music markets because he’s extremely passionate about music. It’s funny, because if you look at his profit on sports, it’s $3 on sports and $380,000 on just music. I think Kalshi is a great way for fans to make money and also to engage and meet all their fellow superfans. We’ve seen a lot of the social part of the platform where they’re all engaging with each other.
I think as Kalshi grows and we have more and more of these people who are experts in music and want to make money on it, there will also be a lot of opportunities for partnerships where we can connect these superfans with other platforms that want to monetize them.
When you monetize fandom, I just wonder how that changes the fan experience. How do you think it will impact the fan experience?
Honestly, the sports industry is a very similar. They asked: if we allow sports betting, how would that affect things? And I think all the leagues — the NFL, NBA, all of them — have seen just a lot more engagement, because now you have even more incentive to research every single part of what you’re watching because you can make money on it. It just adds to how engaged and excited you get about things.
For me personally, [let’s say I’m interested in seeing if] Taylor Swift [will achieve] a number one album. Every new album she releases, we have a market on it… and just watching that market in real time is so exciting to me. I like the fact that I have a source of information on it that isn’t just me going on Twitter and trying to see who’s saying what. I can actually just watch the market. So to me, it’s been great, but obviously I can’t actually trade [on my own platform], so I don’t have the full experience.
Fans can be very passionate about their favorite artists, in a way that can become a bit of a toxic or parasocial relationship. I wonder if prediction markets could make that relationship become even more intense.
One thing that’s a parallel from another industry: in politics, what we’ve noticed — and we’ve talked to a lot of users over time — is that actually the polarization somewhat decreases because of trading. The user or the trader takes a step back and thinks: if I’m going to make money, I have to actually think this through. And in some ways, even though they love a candidate — the example I give is, even though a user loves [Ariana Grande], [they have to be] reasonable about it and say, ‘Well, maybe she’s not going to get the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, because these other actresses have all these things [going for them], and I’m reading all of that.’ In a way, what we’ve noticed time and time again with markets is that when people are putting money where their mouth is, they take a step back and think more rationally. They get more engaged and excited, but they act in a slightly more rational way.
One of the things the music industry has dealt with for decades is a long history of juicing performance metrics. The famous example of this is radio payola. Nowadays, the version of payola in 2026 is streaming fraud. Could adding a betting or trading element to music performance incentivize streaming fraud?
One of the reasons [why] we take market manipulation very seriously is this: we don’t want to list markets where manipulation is acceptable — where someone could actually pull it off. So, with Spotify, we’ve studied how they come up with their numbers and how they actually stop bots and all of that. In some ways, we trust that Spotify has the incentive — because they have to pay out for streams — to try to make sure the numbers are correct, but we really only offer markets that we think are very hard to manipulate. Obviously, like you said, when you’re adding a monetary incentive for these things, that does change things, but the most important thing we do is work with these markets to make sure we’re picking markets where we don’t think manipulation is feasible.
It’s also a federal crime to manipulate markets. From a market integrity and surveillance standpoint: our team is looking, [and if] they notice anything like that they [will] report [it]. We also have a whistleblower program… In some ways, you’re correct that we’re adding the incentive for manipulation — but we’re also adding the punishment, which is significantly higher. You can end up in jail if you do that.
Make a prediction about your prediction markets. What are some features you want to add to Kalshi in the future?
One of the things I’m very excited about is moving out of just the binary yes/no — and having ways that you can invest long term on specific things. For example, with Chappell Roan when she was starting: if you knew she was going to be big, how could you actually get exposure to that and kind of grow with her? So it’s kind of going in that direction, away from the binary. And looking at some of our more traditional futures-style markets is something we’re excited about. We’re also very excited about just listing more and more markets, because now we have more music fans and they’re suggesting so many amazing markets.
